


Old Winter's Song

by scarlettandblue



Category: Wilby Wonderful (2004)
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-16
Updated: 2017-05-20
Packaged: 2018-11-01 11:49:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,242
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10921224
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scarlettandblue/pseuds/scarlettandblue
Summary: Just my take on the happenings that summer on Wilby Island and what might have happened after.  I think the recipie ingredients to summarize this story might be Nostalgic Melancholy with just a pinch of hope





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by the film Wilby Wonderful, and originally written for the ds aprilfools challenge in 2011 and imported from my LJ to here. 
> 
> Disclaimer: I don't own these guys and I don't have any money, I'm just doing this because I love them so, so please don't sue me.

Disclaimer: I don't own these guys and I don't have any money, I'm just doing this because I love them so, so please don't sue me.

 

Duck courts Dan after his release from the hospital. He hates the pain and the lonely despair that drove Dan to what he did, but he can’t help being thankful that the situation means he has to take his time, that he has to take real care with Dan.

He loves that all they do is talk and hold hands and occasionally kiss. It feels like they are building something with foundations, something that will last. He believes they are headed towards the kind of relationship he’s always longed for and never believed he could have. The sweet warmth and gentle comfort of soul-mates. A quiet life full of pleasure and kindness and shared friends, among the people who know them best, and still care for them. A place on Wilby Island. Home.

But it seems that Dan might be more of a cowboy than Duck had bargained for, and about a month and a half in he gets restless.

Dan turns to Duck one evening as they’re walking through the town towards The Watch. Not to hook up or nothing, just because every evening when Duck comes to call, they take a walk to admire the setting sun and to feel the close of the day and enjoy the quiet intimacy of walking together in the twilight, and they always seem to end up there. It feels to Duck like it has become their place. Then on the way to The Watch, out of the blue, Dan says, “I don’t think I can take it here anymore.”

Dan’s face is watchful and sad. He looks a little like he used to before, when the threat was hanging over him, hanging over them all. He looks lost like he had when his wife kicked him out. When he couldn’t see his way towards anything, and all he could do was look back and regret what had happened.

Duck finds himself smiling although really it‘s the last thing he wants to do, but it‘s like he can‘t help it. He can’t help but smile at Dan and take the knock because he’s set his heart on making Dan whole and happy again, and he‘s beginning to think that making Dan happy ultimately might not involve him.

Duck knows this smile of his ain’t a happy thing. He knows the pain he’s hiding shows through it in his eyes and in the way his mouth gets kind of frozen in place. But he thinks he sounds mostly normal when he says, “I don’t know, I figure the worst has happened now, Danny. Everyone is getting used to the idea, getting over it maybe. Give it a week or two and most of the folks here will be too busy worrying about winter and how they gonna manage with no tourist money to give any of this a thought.”

Dan laughs. His laugh was a little high pitched for such a big guy, Duck thought it was a sweet sound though, but it isn’t so sweet that day. It just hurts to hear it on account of Dan looks like it pains him laughing like that, when the expression on his face says he’d rather be crying or something. “You, they might forgive or forget or just pretend it never happened, because you belong here. But they won’t do that for me.”

Duck can’t bear to hear it, he just can’t, but Dan is talking at last. Duck has been waiting and waiting for Dan to start talking, for Dan to open up and say what’s in his heart. Yet he feels that frozen smile on his face start to ache real bad, because it figures that the one time Dan finally opens up to him would be to say his goodbyes.

But Duck MacDonald is no quitter, even if words don’t come so easy to him. So he swallows down his sadness and the fear he’s gonna loose this sweetness before it even got a chance to really be anything, and he says, “They will do that for you, some folks take a little time to get to know you, that’s all.”

Dan shakes his head, but Duck keeps on talking, “Most of them like you already. Sandra and Emily, and even Carol, kind of. And you and me we can just be here and live our lives and people will learn to treat us right and they’ll see we belong. I just know you belong here.”

Dan just looks at him, and Duck feels all the life die right out of him because he’s lost the argument. He can hear how weak that last bit sounded, words always screw him over one way or another, they have his whole life.

“I wish…”

“What do you wish, Dan?”

“I don’t know. That it was different. That I could stay here and wait for people to forgive or forget. I wish I was brave enough to stay. I wish you were a coward who wanted to run away. I just can’t stay here where people know what I did. What I tried to do. I just can’t Duck. I don’t have it in me. I’m sorry.”

And in the face of that kind of misery Duck knows he’s beat. Because all he ever wanted was to make that pain in Dan’s eyes go away. And here he is seeming to make it worse.

From the first when he’d seen Stan creeping around at The Watch all those weeks ago, making notes and taking pictures on his dandy little digital camera. From the first time he’d seen Dan down there with all the other desperate guys, looking pale and sick and wracked with ecstasy and sorrow. From the first gossip he’d heard from Irene’s wicked nasty lips and the misery he’d seen creep up Dan’s face when she turned her eyes on him to stare as he walked down the street. All Duck could think of was he wanted it to stop.

He looked at his friends and his neighbours. People he’d gown up with, people he thought he knew and the only thing he came up with was stand up with Dan and the others when they were named and shamed. Even though his name wasn’t on Stan’s list and he knew damn well there weren’t a photo of him getting up to anything at The Watch, because his days of cruising ended the day he stopped drinking.

Duck knew he was fortunate he’d got the wild out of him long ago. He counted himself lucky he’d escaped that time with nothing worse than a couple of doses of the clap, the understanding that he couldn’t ever take another drink, and the knowledge that he would probably live the rest of his life alone.

But he remembered enough of his wild nights that weren’t lost forever in a haze of vodka or Jack and whatever he could roll up in a joint and smoke, to know his name would have been on the list, back in the day. His picture would have been front and centre in any news paper article, if anyone had done this kind of crazy witch hunt all those years ago. So he stood up and counted himself among them. Outed himself to Sandra and her Daughter, and to Buddy French, and eventually to just about anyone who took the trouble to look.

And it was all for nothing. Because Dan said he couldn’t stay. And Duck knows he won’t do so well on the mainland, he tried four times and he always ended up back on Wilby Island.

So he smiles and he tries real hard to mean it, to let Dan see he understands and he forgives him, and he says, “I guess you are a real cowboy after all. And it’s time for you to move on.”

 

*****************

 

Buddy didn’t know what he wanted. He imagined that had always been his trouble. Ever since High School he’d been looking for something. Couple of times he thought he’d found it. First had been when he ditched college and signed up for the Police Academy. He thought he’d found his place. The thing he was meant to be.

Then he meet Carol, and he fell in love, with her painting, with her. He’d thought he was in love before, maybe a couple of times, but it had just been kid’s stuff. Carol was the real thing.

And that was it, his life was perfect. He made detective, Carol had her own gallery, and her art was beginning to get noticed.

 

Then his mom got sick and they had to come back to Wilby. After that everything seemed to slide away from him.

Carol and his mom were at each other’s throats. He hated being a small town cop. Everything that he’d loved about growing up on the Island seemed to turn to shit when he found himself having to arrest guys he’d been at school with for DUI or domestic abuse. When he had to make time with people he despised, like Brett Fucking Fisher. Not long after they moved back Carol stopped painting, and they stopped talking about having kids.

He could see himself turning into someone he hated. He started smoking again, and he took to sinking a couple of beers every night before he went home. He took his mother’s side in arguments with Carol and Carol’s side in arguments with his Mom and he honestly couldn’t tell the difference most of the time.

Then late one afternoon he was sitting in his cruiser smoking and looking out over The Watch, wondering how late he could leave it before going home when the door opened and a woman sat down in the passenger seat and said. “I swear to God, the last time I saw you, Buddy French you were sitting in this very spot in your Daddy’s Lincoln. Course you were smoking something that wasn’t legal.”

Then she leaned across and kissed his cheek and just like that the years seemed to fall away from him and he laughed and said, “Hello Sandra.” and gave her a smile, like he used to, looking up at her through his lashes, the smile he knew got her hot for him.

“I see you ain’t changed none.” It could have sounded mean or even sarcastic, a comment like that, but there was a smile on her face and a sparkle in her eyes as she spoke, and that took the sting out of it.

It made him laugh again, and he offered her a cigarette and lit it for her. They sat in a companionable quiet for a minute just smoking and remembering. And pretty soon remembering turned into something else and they were kissing. It was intense, like he remembered it used to be, when he was sixteen and Sandra knew how to rev his engine like no one else.

But he wasn’t sixteen any more and pretty soon the gear shift was making unpleasant contact with his knee. Then his back started to complain at how he was twisted round, and Buddy remembered why he didn’t make out in cars any more. The nostalgia, or the whatever kind of mid life craziness had taken hold, faded away and he remembered the main reason he didn’t make out in cars or anywhere else.

Buddy hated cheaters, maybe because it had been an open secret that his Dad cheated on his Mom. So it froze him in place when he realised he was no different. Sandra pulled back, looking at him, with that same expression she’d sometimes have in high school, like he was pretty stupid but he amused her. She patted his cheek and said, “Catch you later, Buddy.” And got out of the car.

For the next several months the Island’s gossips had a lot to talk about. Most of it focussing on Sandra Anderson’s return to Wilby, and speculating who Emily’s father might be, or how long Sandra would be able to stick at running Iggy’s.

Buddy had a tense couple of days until he was able to confirm Emily was at least a year too young to be his. Still it had made him think about his life in a way he hadn’t in years.

He hadn‘t much liked what he saw, and that made him restless. And everywhere he looked things were off key. Stan was acting squirrelly, Brett Fisher kept calling the office and asking dumb questions about old statutes and shit. Carol seemed to be going quietly insane, and his Mom was breaking his heart because he could see her slipping away.

The only people on the Island who seemed to be acting normal were Sandra and Duck. But Buddy was always just a little uncomfortable around Duck, on account of Duck looked at him like he knew some big secret thing, something Buddy didn’t know. So he found himself drinking a lot of coffee at Iggy’s.

And coffee drinking always seemed to lead to Sandra needing his help with a stuck light bulb in the pantry, or broken screen in the side ally, and the minute the door was shut and they were alone they couldn’t keep their hands off each other.

Kissing and grabbing, pushed up against the pantry door or the siding out back of the kitchen. It was hot and desperate and they were always being interrupted after a few moments. But it was a few minutes when Buddy remembered he was alive. It was the antidote to the slow creeping death he could see in his mother’s eyes, and the ice floe his marriage had become.

 

And then suddenly the madness around him went into overdrive.

Carol started to expand her Real Estate business, she took over as Chair of the Wilby Festival and she quit smoking. It was only because he had no belief in the supernatural, that saved Buddy from thinking his wife had been replaced by some kind of demon look-a-like.

Then his Mom died. Buddy hated that what he felt was a mixture of sadness and relief. But she wasn’t in pain and she wasn’t looking at him with her already dead eyes, and maybe she might have found some peace at last, a thing she had never seemed to know as long as he could remember.

Then the town was over-run with malicious gossip and ugly rumours about what had been going on at The Watch. All Buddy felt a kind of detached amazement.

He knew Brett was up to something, the guy was oozing sleazy bonhomie, but he couldn’t seem to rouse enough interest in it to care. And Carol was wound tighter than a spring and he knew something ugly was gonna explode, but all he felt was a numb resignation. Stan was driving him crazy and when Duck all but outed himself, all Buddy felt was bemused, but not at all surprised.

 

The aftermath was like waking up from a weird dream. Figuring out what Brett had been doing and putting a stop to it. Trying to be understanding about what Carol had done. People had looked at him like they were waiting for him to react. To maybe explode, or go insane.

But he surprised himself, because he understood. He didn’t like it but he understood the Brett’s of the world all too well. People who only know what stuff is worth to them, but don’t ever see the true value of something. And he understood Sandra, they had just been doing that same crazy dance they did in High School, until she figured out she had better things to do with her time.

But most of all he understood Carol. He understood how desperate she had been. How easily he’d shut her out. He’d forgotten how she used to be his best friend as well as his wife, he knew they had lost too much and they’d shared too little to ever get that back. He knew she was going to leave the Island, and he knew he wasn’t.  
So when Carol said, “I can’t do it any more. I can’t stand to be here.”

He had replied, “I know, honey.”

“I hate it, I hate people knowing what I did.” Tears were welling in her eyes and spilling onto her cheeks.

He couldn’t stand to see her like that, in such sorrow, so he pulled her into a warm embrace and pressed his face into her hair and said, “But you saved his life, sweetheart. Try and remember that.”

Carol seemed to change in his arms, then. Like she was standing a little taller, a little firmer “I hate what I did. Hate it.”

She pulled away from him, and he waited for her to say it.

“I can’t stay here. This place, what happened, I don’t know how it’s supposed to be, but I know it’s not meant to be like this. I’m not meant to be like this. How did I forget who I am?”

“You don’t paint anymore.”

“No.”

“You used to say painting wasn’t what you did, it was who you were.”

“Yes.”

“You could paint here.”

“No this is where I stopped painting.”

“I loved that you painted.” Buddy sees the knowledge bloom in Carol’s eyes at that. And he feels melancholy but he feels relief too, because he knows she’s made her choice. He doesn’t want to loose her, but he knows he lost her a long time ago. He knows because it doesn‘t hurt like it should when he says, “You‘re leaving?”

“You have to stay?” She asks, and he sees her relief when he nods.

 

***************************

 

It feels like the last days of Autumn.

The sky falls to a sullen grey most days, and the sea is mercury coloured where it slides like oil against the rocky shore. Everything seems to be calm but winter storms are just around the corner.

 

Buddy takes a walk out to The Watch as the light fails each day. He has always loved the view and he has begun to understand the meaning it holds for him. Not as his grandfather used to say, because he can look out and see where he came from. For Buddy, The Watch is the place that made him understand what he was really here for. What his place in the world really was.

He stands and looks out and it feels like this is the place he was always meant to be. His role to keep watch, to safeguard what was important about this place, and about the people he has been chosen to watch over.

 

 

*******************

 

 

It feel like winter is nearly on them and Duck misses Dan every day. It’s a wonder to him because he never figured he be with anyone again like that. And he never was, not really, not with Dan. But somehow that time he spent watching over the man, and the scant few weeks they had after, before Dan left the Island, has woken up a place inside Duck that don’t seem to want to quiet down again.

Much earlier in his life Duck had been full of a quiet kind of happiness, and full of the secret he knew about himself. It was something most people thought to be shameful or a sin or un-natural, even more so back then. It had made his Daddy awful hard on him, but then again if it hadn’t been that it would have been something else, because his Daddy was just born mean, so Duck had always liked that he was different.

Knowing what his difference was and what he needed to make him happy in life, it was hard but then he looked around at the people he knew and it was clear they had no idea what it would take to make them happy, so it felt like he was better off than they were.

But life has a way of twisting what you wanted at sixteen and making it into something you come to regret by your twenties. So for a long time Duck lost that feeling. Drowned it in the bottom of a bottle. And he’s a little afraid if he goes home when his day is over he’ll be tempted by the same remedy now. So he’s taken to walking out at The Watch.

He stands on the cliff and looks out to sea and it feels like he’s where he was always mean to be. He wishes that Dan could have stayed with him on the Island, but he understands a small place like this isn’t for everyone.

And he’s not always alone out at the Watch. Someone new keeps watch there too.


	2. Casual

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I admit it. I had forgotten I even wrote this second part to the 1st piece! From the prompt "Casual"  
> Still it makes me hanker to see this film again.

Autumn had a real bite to it now, and the wind was chilling. Yet Duck still felt like he needed to stay out of the house until he was sure of himself for the night, and the cold seemed to help.

It had been a few weeks since Dan left and it was getting better, slowly. And he was honest enough with himself to admit it was probably something that had never destined to work.

Dan had been someone he had admired from a distance. Someone he had been drawn to save. And the drama and the misery, the threat hanging over everyone, had heightened their feelings, had made everything so intense. But the truth was, what Duck longed for was, something peaceful. Love that was gentle and made him feel calm, safe even. A person who he could sit quiet with, in the evenings. Someone who didn’t need to be saved and could trust Duck not to need saving neither. Or maybe someone who did need to be saved but would turn round and save Duck right back.

Truth was, from a distance Dan had looked like a man who might appreciate a little peace and quiet, but up close the silences falling between them had been awkward, and Duck had struggled to fill them. And then in the end Dan had broken the silence to say he couldn’t stay.

So Duck had his quiet back but strangely he wasn’t alone.

Every evening Buddy would be there. Standing down by the water‘s edge, or sitting on the rocks above where the breakers came in, smoking and looking out to sea.

At first Duck watched him from the high point on the cliffs above, the place where he always stood. He kept his distance, like he did with most people at first.

Maybe that habit started with his Daddy. Duck had never had the knack of getting along with his father, no matter how hard he tried and in the end he’d just stayed out of his way whenever he could. He’s always been cautious as a child; quiet and watchful until he knew where he stood. His mother had teased him about it when he was young, but she’d done it gently, like she knew why his first instinct was always to hang back and wait. Maybe it was something that had come from her. His mother had a quiet way with her and yet she usually got what she wanted, even from his Daddy. Older people on the Island would say he had a lot of his mother in him. But he knew that he had his father’s temper when he drank.

But he didn’t fight now, not since the drinking had stopped. Although he’d surprised himself a while back, with that kid who’d been trying to get into Emily’s pants. But he supposed that was different, because no one would stand by and watch some punk kid push a girl around. And he kept an eye on Emily now, spoke to her sometimes if he called in to Iggys for coffee and a donut first thing. He figured she needed a little looking out for.

He kept an eye on her mother, Sandra, too. She had always been someone he‘d watch out for when he was back in school. He’d watched her and Buddy circle round each other back then, much like they’d been doing more recently. That had all come to an end though, and it made him figure Sandra might have finally grown up a bit.

And that brought him back to Buddy. Sitting out at The Watch half the night. Seemed like Buddy needed some one to look out for him as well. Tongues had been wagging in the town about his wife leaving.

So some evenings, after he’d stood a while letting the sea and the cold, fresh air pare the troubles of the day off him, he’ll wander down to the shore. Taking it slow. Keeping it casual. Treating Buddy like he‘d treated Dan. Wary, like if he made too sudden a move it might startle him into running off.

Buddy would tense up at first, hearing someone approach, but he’d relax again, once he knew who it was. And they’d just hang out, standing on the beach or sitting on the rocks above the breakers. Far enough apart to have their own space and solitude, but close enough that it didn’t feel so lonesome looking out to sea like that, as the sky grew dark and night settled in.


End file.
